MLBTV

That Didn’t Work Out So Well

I’ve been watching the FRS play baseball for a week now on MLB.TV, so yesterday when I tried to watch all I was offered was the audio. WTF. Turns out the game was on Apple TV+, who has worked out a deal with baseball to broadcast 2 Friday games every week.

Let me go and see if I can get a free trial just so I could watch the game. I already was a subscriber about a year ago, so I thought maybe if I use Donna’s name and a different email I could get one. Wrong, they are smarter than me I was denied. Might have worked had I used a different charge card…

Well, the lure of the game made me plunk down the one penny less than a 10 spot for a month of Apple TV+. My reward was after watching 5 wins in a row on MLB.TV, the Red Sox lost the Friday game 9-2 to the San Diego Padres.

The $9.99 is not a total loss though as now I can watch the third season of Slow Horses.

Just When I Thought I Was Out

They pulled me back in.

Earlier this month my BIL asked me how my Red Sox were doing and I really had no idea. I haven’t paid any attention for the last 3 or 4 years, curiosity peaked, I checked. In the AL East the Yankees were leading the division with the Baltimore Orioles a game back. The Red Sox along with the Rays and Blue Jays were battling for third place a whooping 15 games behind the MFY with all three hovering right around the .500 mark.

I looked ahead and last Saturday the Red Sox were going to be playing the Yankees with the game being Fox’s Saturday Game of the Week. When I tuned in, the game was between the Seattle Mariners and the Texas Rangers. I guess because I’m west of the Mississippi I wouldn’t care about those two northeastern teams. So when an email showed up in my inbox on Sunday about my last chance to get MLB.TV at half price for the rest of the season, I signed up.

I would like to think that the fact that the FRS have won 4 straight was because that I started watching their games, but I know better. I’m sure they will soon settle back into that middling win one, lose one scheme of the first half of the season.

Ted Lasso Erases A Week Of My Life

In a couple of day’s ago post I mentioned watching the Red Sox playing on MLBTV. Well, one of the commercials in between innings was an offer for a 2 month free trial of Apple TV+. I had the commercial on mute, so I didn’t hear what they were on about, but I thought, “Hmmm, I’ve wanted to check Apple TV+, but never pulled the trigger for one reason or another. This looks a pretty good deal.”

So, I went to apple.co/mlbgift and signed up (offer is good until July 7th if you are interested.) Turns out the reason is that Apple TV+ has the rights to one Friday night baseball game, chosen by MLB maybe, for the season and they also have a 30 minute nightly MLB recap. I have not bothered with the recap show, but I did watch an inning or two of last Friday’s Dodgers Cardinals game. I may keep and eye out for Red Sox game on Fridays between now and June 24th when my free trial ends.

So, anyway, the first show I wanted to check out was this Ted Lasso show all the cool people were talking about. Tuesday night the 18th I watched Season 1 Episode 1. I wasn’t sure what all the fuss was about, it seemed like just another fish out of water story and Jason Sudeikis’s character seemed too broadly drawn and the accent was kind of over the top. I wasn’t going to watch anymore, but as I was talking to Donna about it, I suggested watching Episode 2 on Wednesday at lunch and if she seemed interested we would watch the show together.

She was not interested, so I figured that was that. Later that afternoon, with nothing else going on I thought, let me watch episode three and if I don’t get into it, I’ll move on. After that third show I watched the fourth. I got interested in the arcs of the cast of characters that surround out titular hero and I am a lover of listening to the accents when the Queen’s English is spoken. And I’d become used to the Ted Lasso character.

On Thursday I watched the next four episodes, this left only two episodes of the first season for Friday which lead to rolling right into season two. The only time I came up for air over the the weekend was Sunday night to watch Thursday’s new episode of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel my previous favorite show.

Sometime on Tuesday I ran out of episodes when I finished episode 6 of season three. So now I had to wait until the next day for Apple TV+ to release the next show and after that I’d stuck waiting a whole week between new episodes. I briefly considered waiting for 6 weeks so I could binge those last set of season three’s shows, but couldn’t do it, I watched episode seven the next day when it became available.

It Works

Two weeks ago I found out that the FRS were the free game of the day on MLBTV, so I thought I’d tune in. They were in last place in the division at 5 wins and 6 loses, but hey it’s still early in the season. I just looked today and currently the Red Sox are 13 & 13 and still in last place in the division, two games behind the Yankees and eight behind the division leading Tampa Bay Rays. Oh. well, wait’ll next year.

Plus I also wanted to see a game and check on how the whole pitch clock thing was working out. I’m not sure how the players like the clock, but according to a Bleacher Report article, MLB says it has knocked an average of 26 minutes from game times. Wow. The game I watched with the Angels still went almost 3 hours, but hey, it could have been nearly 3-1/2 hours.

I scanned back several games and found that several of their games have been just a few minutes over two and a half hours. This means that if I was still back on the east coast those 7:10 PM starts would be ending at a sensible half past ten. This pitch clock thing might have even prevented those games against their arch rivals the Yankees running to nearly midnight. And if I remember, I’ll see how long the games against New York when they play them on back to back weekends in early June.

Blacked Out

Back in Aiken the only team MLB.TV blacked me out from watching the Red Sox play was the Atlanta Braves which are 140 miles away. This was never a problem because our cable system carried TBS which broadcast the games. I could watch the Red Sox play their division rivals in Tampa and Baltimore, the next closest teams which are 200 miles away.

The Red Sox are currently playing a 3-game series against the Seattle Mariners and I am 370 miles (as the crow flies) from T-Mobile Park, but in spite of that distance, I am blacked out from viewing the game.

Out here I am blacked out from the San Francisco Giants and Oakland Athletics games as well, both places being around 310 miles away. I can see either of the Los Angeles teams, Dodgers or Angels because they are about twice as far away as the Bay Area teams.

None of this is a real problem anyway because I subscribe to a VPN which lets me pretend to be where I’m not. Right now I’m virtually in Denver.

The only issue with this is I have to watch the game on the desktop PC or the cell phone. I can watch it on a TV, but I’d have to get the game up on the PC and then use an HDMI cable to the TV, which is usually not worth the effort.

Hope Springs Eternal

⚾ 2018 seems so long ago.

For 2019 I just listened to the Red Sox play baseball and was glad I hadn’t coughed up the hundred bucks or so for the video because they were just a mid-level team finishing mid-division and out of the playoffs. For 2020 I bought the radio package again expecting more of the same. COVID put a damper on the season, limiting the season to a mere 60 games, but the FRS did not disappoint me and lost 60% of those games, finishing last in the division.1

With our move to the west coast I though listening to the games in the afternoon would be more fun that late evening, but I was wrong, I probably listened to maybe a quarter of those 60 games. Just wasn’t the same. So this year I thought maybe I’d try watching the games. I’d have two options, watch them live at 4:00pm or watch the replay of the game at 8:00. I cancelled the audio package and signed up for the TV package.

Because it is April and still chilly in Beantown the first 3 games of the season, at home against Baltimore, were 1:00pm games meaning that they stated at 10:00am here. Morning baseball, mmm, weird, but okay in a way. But not fun as the Sox lost all three games, including an 11-3 shellacking in the finale that was over by the 3rd inning. There are like 3 players left on the the team that I remember from 2018 and now I’m sort of regretting paying that much money to watch a team that looks destined to finish dead last in the division again.

Fortunately I signed up for the free 7 day trial to start, so as of yet they haven’t hit the charge card. The Tampa Bay Rays come to town for the next three games and if they don’t win at least 2 of those, I’m going to just cancel and not be out the money.

Red Sox Win The World Series Again!

This morning we watched Game #5 of the 2018 World Series on MLBTV and the Red Sox beat the Los Angeles Dodgers 5 to 1 to win the 2018 World Series! Again!

The 2020 baseball season is supposed to start in less than 3 weeks, but not everybody is so sure, Mike Trout for one and me for another. But either way, I’m thinking that my access to MLBTV will be shut off pretty soon so I’m glad I got to watch the 2018 series again. And, unlike last time, I watched every single inning of every game.

You know, if you look back at my 2018 post about them winning, I talked about my buying a 2018 WS Champions hat. It included pictures of my previous hats from 2004, 2007 and 2013 from the MLB shop and the one from there of the 2018 that the players got on the field in 2018. I didn’t really like the MLB shop one, it was gray instead of blue, so I hunted up something that looked more along the lines of the previous three and I finally found it, I think on the Dick’s Sporting Goods store page. Less than 2 years later, that 2018 hat is long gone enough that I don’t even remember what happened to it…

That MLB Shop gray 2018 World Series Hat that I didn’t like is still available. Maybe I should buy now?